Vampires from outer space, pirate treasure, time machines, cowboys defending homesteaders, dinosaurs, a half-naked warrior vanquishing hordes of enemies, a house that turns into the biggest popcorn machine in history.

These are the images you would have seen in some of Hollywood's major productions of the past year – in Lifeforce, The Goonies, Back to the Future, Silverado, My Science Project, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Real Genius.

This list may remind some older Americans of the kinds of movie choices they faced when they were children during the 1930s '40s, or '50s. Those films could be neatly defined – as science fiction, horror, Westerns, war pictures, and slapstick comedies. For critics and moviemakers, these labels, along with others, such as musicals, mysteries, and thrillers, sort out the major film “genres.”

A decade and a half ago, the genre film seemed close to becoming an endangered species. Hollywood had largely turned away from the old standbys, seemingly forever (although it still produced a fair number of them), in favor of more experimental films in the vein of Steelyard Blues and Five Easy Pieces. “What these films – and others – had in common,” writes Arthur Knight, a film historian, “was their articulation of contemporary attitudes and emotions, in a language that had its own modern rhythms and nuances.”

But Hollywood attentively follows ticket sales at the box office, and by the mid-1970s, the movie-going public was telling studio executives that it wanted old-fashioned genre films again.